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by dragontamer 2139 days ago
> Adding DRAM to a GPU-heavy machine has limited benefit due to the relatively low bandwidth to the device. They're effectively both HBM machines if you need the ~TB bandwidth per device (or per socket).

This POWER10 chip under discussion has 1TB bandwidth to devices with expandable RAM.

Yeah, I didn't think it was possible. But... congrats to IBM for getting this done. Within the context of this hypothetical POWER10, 1TB bandwidth interconnects to expandable RAM is on the table.

2 comments

It's 410 GB/s peak for DDR5. The "up to 800 GB/s sustained" is for GDDR6 and POWER10 isn't slated to ship until Q4 2021 so it isn't really a direct comparison with hardware that was deployed in 2019.
IIRC, the new memory connection they introduced with the latest POWER9 chips traded bandwidth and physical distance for a bit of latency.
Slides posted earlier in this thread say the OMI (the memory interface) adds about 10ns compared to straight DDR5.